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Good stuff, and good tip about the cached test only version. I hadn't heard that one before, and it looks like I might use it plenty. Thanks!

Thank you. We did try to have a .uk version of our site, which failed, but there was less of a focus on making that change for SEO reasons. I will keep the country TLD in mind going forward. We are on the verge of some language-specific content so that might be a good time to consider this. Thanks!

Was going to disavow them but have reached out and asked for a nofollow on the menu because they do have some legitimate mentions in their forums that are worth preserving. We actually have no manual actions against us, but we do have some links that are very dodgy ( like the 6.4 million links from these paragons of virtue: http://ebetsports.com/). I am trying to stay on top of it before we get the call. We also have what I would consider a low DA versus our competitors, since we are a 20+ year old domain, so I am stripping the low hanging fruit while trying to get back to basic 'average' SEO.

Addendum to this story: it turns out that this was likely a malicious activity with an extremely similar IP address to ours so we might not notice. We have disavowed.